A Big Welcome to Apple Season with Rosina’s Apple Cake

Apple cake rocks.

It’s apple-picking time. If you’re like me, you’re taking advantage of the Skookum Gleaners (formerly ‘Fruit Tree Project’), and helping fruit/nut tree owners to share their excess fruit with pickers and charities around town . For more info, check out: http://skookumfood.ca/gleaners). Of course this means lots of extra fruit to dry, freeze, can or make into wines and cordials, preserve in alcohol or sugar, and maybe even pickle.

On a more conventional note though, the following recipe –named after my mom, whose recipe this is, more or less — is a great way to use up 6-8 apples. It’s kind of like an early Autumn fruitcake. It serves 10-12. Potential local ingredients are: local butter, eggs, nuts, apples (d’uh), raisins, milk. If you make my own vanilla extract from vanilla beans, and grind your own wheat, you can raise the local content a notch or two.

You’ll need:

Dry Ingredients:

· 6 oz golden brown or brown sugar

· 1/2 teaspoon salt

· 1 teaspoon baking soda

· 1/2 teaspoon baking powder

· 1 teaspoon cinnamon

· 14 oz flour (can be 7 oz whole wheat and 7 oz cake flour)

Wet Ingredients:

· 3.5 oz vegetable oil (or melted butter)

· 2 tablespoons milk

· 1 tsp vanilla

· 2 eggs (have them at room temp.)

Fruit and nuts and other:

· 4 oz semi-sweet chocolate chips

· 1/2 cup nuts (roasted walnuts and almonds good too)

· 1/2 cup raisins (soak raisins in warm water for 1 hour, then drain and squeeze the water out)

· 3 cups of apples. (Probably 5 or 6 large apples. Peel and core the apples; cut each into 4 parts, then cut each part in half, then cut across the slices into chunks of roughly 1/2″)

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Get all your ingredients ready to go. Grease a 10″x12″x3″ Pyrex pan, set your oven to 360 or so degrees.

Then mix the oil, salt, sugar, milk, vanilla and eggs with a mixer or by hand with a whisk, for about 2 minutes.

Put the flour, baking soda, baking powder into a bowl and blend the dry ingredients together.

Start adding the dry mix to the wet mix a bit at a time, whilst mixing.

Then add the raisins, chocolate and nuts.

Turn the mixer off. Wash your hands well.

Then add the apple pieces and blend this with your hands (!) It’s basically like you’re coating the apple pieces with the rather sticky mixture.

Using your hands again (yes, it’s messy), toss the mix into the pan and flatten it out.

Pop into your oven for about 60 minutes– check often . The result should be quite dark in colour; if using a Pyrex pan (recommended), check underneath after 50 minutes to see if the bottom is ok; you’ll want it looking like a dark toasted colour, but not black.

Remove from over, let cool on a rack, remove from the pan, and cool some more. Sprinkle some icing sugar on top if you like.

Cut into brownie-sized chunks. Store it in the fridge as there is a lot of moisture and it could go moldy otherwise. Will keep for 1 week in the fridge. It’s a hearty cake, so a little goes a long way; you may want to freeze half.